Canadian Dollar Soft After Employment Falls

The Canadian dollar was soft today, falling after mixed macroeconomic releases in Canada. Macro reports revealed that last month new house prices have been rising but employment demonstrated a significant decline.
Statistics Canada reported that the New Housing Price Index rose by 0.7% in January — the fastest pace of increase since October. That was a far better reading than 0.3% registered in December and 0.2% predicted by analysts.
Data from Automatic Data Processing revealed that employment dropped by 231,200 in January. Meanwhile, the December reading got a huge positive revision from a decline of 28,200 to a big gain of 338,200. Losses were registered in all sectors of the economy.
Adding to the downside pressure on the Canadian currency was the decline of crude oil prices. Crude logged a loss of about 0.2% during the American trading session despite the bigger-than-expected drop of US crude oil inventories. US stockpiles of crude showed a decline of 7.3 million barrels last week — a much bigger drop than the 2.1 million barrels predicted by experts.
Now, traders wait for tomorrow’s release of Canadian retail sales data. Analysts had estimated ahead of the report that retail sales dropped by 2.5% in December following a 1.3% increase in the previous month.
USD/CAD was little changed at 1.2704 as of 17:25 GMT today after touching the session high of 1.2731 and the low of 1.2665. EUR/CAD rallied from 1.5283 to 1.5345, reaching the session maximum of 1.5368 intraday. NZD/CAD was up from 0.9130 to 0.9146, while its daily maximum was at 0.9161.
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Original from: www.earnforex.com